Scorpio Black beeping

Hi all, I have a 160GB WD1600BJKT-75F4T0 in a Dell Studio XPS 1640 which is bleeping incessantly, specifically in the morning. I'm pretty sure it's the hard drive, as it's a different tone to the Windows and BIOS beeps and seems to be coming from the bottom left corner, where the hard drive is located.

There is no particular pattern to the beeping -- sometimes it will beep once every couple of minutes, sometimes it will beep once a second, sometimes it will go days or weeks without beeping.

All the SMART diagnostics seem to be coming back clean, but the odd thing is the beeping stops while the test is running.

What I'm really asking is whether anyone has encountered this before, if the drive is in danger of failing (other than the danger of being thrown against the wall, that is) and if there's anything I can do about it short of buying a new hard drive.

Re: Scorpio Black beeping

I, too, have heard these sounds coming from my computer. Similarly to you, I'm very confident that it comes from the hard drive (WD Scorpio Black WD1600BJKT-00F4T0 in my case). Sometimes a week can pass without a 'blip', but other times it does it several times a minute and it's especially common after (when disk is near-idle!) high disk I/O such as running diagnostics utility or performing safe erase, when disk temperature is high (around 45C).

I can not say whether this is detrimental to the drive or not, but I do have some minor trouble with mine. Specifically talking - an unstable sector which manages to fail DLGDIAG for Windows tests, but DOS version passes without errors. SMART is fine, apart from the occasional 1 Current Pending Sector value.

I will send you a private message with a link to my recording, just to verify that we indeed have identical issue.